Yesterday, the latest science scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) came out, and the same sad pattern we’ve seen for years repeated itself. Between 1996 and 2005 scores rose in 4th grade, remained stagnant in 8th grade, and dropped for high school seniors. In other words, it’s still the case that the longer children stay in American schools, the worse they do.
Unfortunately, something else also remained the same: the shameless compulsion among people in Washington, despite decades of failure, to claim credit for good news and to have the solutions for bad. Case in point, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’s reaction to the NAEP report, in which she not only dubbed the federal No Child Left Behind Act a cure for failure in subjects the law directly addresses, but even those it doesn’t:
The Science 2005 Report….provides further evidence that accountability and assessments are working to raise achievement levels, even in subjects not directly tested under the No Child Left Behind Act [NCLB]. Fourth-graders made significant improvements in science over 1996 and 2000 levels, with the lowest-performing students making the largest gains and achievement gaps narrowing. However, eighth-graders showed no significant gains. And among 12th-graders, scores declined….The results illustrate the need to introduce NCLB’s accountability principles to our nation’s high schools.
So when the same sorry pattern repeats itself, the adults in charge of American education proclaim that they must be doing something right. In light of this, is it any wonder that our children do worse and worse the longer they stay in school?
